I recently found myself needing to rename around 100 files. The reason was that I had saved a series of video fragments from the middle of a much larger streaming video – so the fragment number of each filename was a sequence that started from about 1000, whereas the script I described in a previous post to join Adobe streaming fragments together needs fragments to be numbered sequentially from 1.

I considered writing a script to do it, but after a quick search of the internet came across a piece of software called Bulk Rename Utility which seemed to do the job really nicely.

The interface looks a bit scary at first, but actually it’s pretty logical when you get the hang of it. The bottom half of the screen shows various rules – numbered 1 to 14, which you can individually optionally enable. By combining them you can form quite complicated renaming rules – even more so if you conduct more than one pass over your filenames.

But the best feature is that you can click on any file in the file browser at the top half of the screen to preview instantly what the filename will be changed to after applying the current rules. When you’re happy, just run it over all the selected files.

It’s not a task I need to do very often, so I just thought I’d note it here in the hope of reminding myself next time I need it, or in case anyone reading this ever needs to do the same.